Vegetation Information System

The NSW Vegetation Information System (VIS) provides the NSW Government, its clients and the community with a central authoritative repository for native vegetation data.

Information about vegetation is used widely within government for a range of activities, for example, by environmental consultants for assessments, the Rural Fire Service for fire management, by catchment management authorities (CMAs) for monitoring the effectiveness of their land-use planning, and by local government for environmental management and planning.

The VIS provides users with consistent, reliable and integrated information about NSW vegetation by developing publicly accessible databases and standards, and by refining data acquisition, management and delivery procedures.

The VIS is made up of a number of separate components arranged under three topics. Explore these links for more detail:

What’s new

The SIX Vegetation Channel has been decommissioned.

A replacement viewer will be available via the OEH Open Data Portal soon. Further advice will be posted on this web page.

The full VIS FloraSurvey database is now available online as a module of the new NSW Wildlife Atlas. To use this system to enter, query or export systematic vegetation plot data you will need to apply for a login here. This system currently contains over 60,000 survey sites. A more limited read-only version of this application is available through the OEH BioNet-Atlas website and does not require a login

A Plant Community Type Identification Tool has been developed to support the field identification of NSW plant community types and NSW Vegetation Formations. The tool can be accessed either online through the VIS Classification database, or as a downloadable application for use in the field.

More information

Access to the component databases is free. Some online applications require users to register while others have unrestricted access. Detailed explanations and instructions are available on the relevant pages.